The world’s top cellphone maker, Nokia, plans to build social networking into its S60 software reports Reuters. Twango technology will enable it to bring community features faster to a wide range of phones, company officials said.
The Twango service, acquired by Nokia in July, was founded by former Microsoft veterans, and headquartered in Redmond, Washington. It allows users to share photos, video or audio files on popular social networking sites.
“We are going to integrate it with our S60 platform,” Stephen Johnston, senior business development manager at Nokia, said in a speech to a trade fair in Helsinki. “It’s really going to be the underlying layer, across everything.”
Twango lets you create “channels”. As a channel owner you can determine who gets to view your channel, contribute media, add comments or keywords, get hi-resolution originals of media, and see the channel participants list.
Last week, Nokia unveiled a new music store and gaming service, and said it would wrap them with a mapping service under the new brand “Ovi“, a Finnish word for “door”.
Nokia’s S60 software platform is used extensively in Nokia’s line-up of mid- to high-end phones, but also in advanced handsets of LG Electronics and Samsung phones. Its closest rival is Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.
Revenues from running networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo on cell phones are expected to rise sharply in coming years as so-called “user-generated content”, once a niche concept, starts to win mass appeal.
Juniper Research expects global, end-user generated revenues from social networking, dating and personal content delivery services will increase from $572m in 2007 to more than $5.7bn in 2012, with social networking accounting for 50% of the total by the end of the forecast period.
Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile phone company by revenue, in February made a deal with Myspace owner News Corp, that allows customers to post profiles, videos and blogs on a mobile phone version of MySpace.
Meanwhile, Palm has canceled the Foleo even before the first units were produced. The Palm’s Foleo was a lightweight Linux “mobile companion” that was designed to read e-mail, but didn’t work with corporate e-mail software from RIM or Motorola. The decision will cost the company $10 million, says the Mercury News.
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